If Portal crash, you have a serious issue with your computer because it's one of the easiest game to execute. Install your drivers dude.
As for Linux being stable for servers, well that's exactly what Linux excel at, you give it some predetermined set of applications and rules and you stick with it. Totally the inverse of using a computer for a desktop usage (which include playing games) where you keep changing installed applications all the time. Windows is still far far ahead on this domain.

Can someone please explain the appeal of these games? To me, they're full of stupid puzzles and sophomoric quirkiness. What am I missing? Is it symptomatic of a dull generation?

Portal had some of the most amusing dark humor in a game that I've ever heard. While I won't say that the gameplay redefined a genre, as someone who is terrible at FPS, it was a refreshing change to not be "go here, blow this up, shoot these guys, get cake". Granted, it was "go here, press this button, get cake", but I actually like puzzles, so perhaps that is where I found most of my entertainment.

Minecraft I agree. Can't find the appeal either. It's a sandbox construction game. In 15min you've seen everything the game has to offer and you have to "invent" your own stories. Can be good for artistic types, but honestly they better invest time in real art application(2d/3d) than playing Minecraft.
As for Portal though, well, I don't understand your point. Puzzle are actually very smart (not stupid), story is great, humor is great, graphics are great, the game is smooth and bugless, level design and ex

In 15min you've seen everything the game has to offer and you have to "invent" your own stories.

No, you've seen everything the game has to offer you. Other people are not you.

Disclaimer: not a Minecraft fan.

but honestly they better invest time in real art application(2d/3d) than playing Minecraft.

Yeah? Or what? What is it with this I-know-what's-best-for-you attitude? If it makes someone happy to spend hours building a blocky version of the Enterprise in a primitive virtual world, what's the big deal?

You're missing maturity. Specifically, the maturity to realize that trolling in online forums is a waste of time and not ultimately fulfilling. Why don't you go read a book or call a friend if you're bored?

I wonder if they're finding it difficult to port their titles to Linux. I've been steadily watching my Linux games section of Steam for months now (since the announcement of SteamOS) and I have to say it is still pretty much just as pitiful as it ever was in comparison to the Windows list. Studios don't seem to be jumping on board... yet.

Steam Boxes will have to be out in the wild for a while to get a sizable user base before alot of devs would create Linux ports I would guess. The current SteamOS Linux user numbers are so low it wouldn't be financially viable for a big company to make a Linux version, unless they plan on supporting SteamOS and are willing eat the dev cost losses until the user numbers grow. Valve has the $ and incentive to do alot of devs don't have that luxury.

The bigger issues I've found in linux area) Sound. Using DOTA2 for an example, you get one option for the sound card, without any pulse/alsa channel or device selections. My system has a soundcard, HDMI audio, and USB headset. Switching outputs is easier in 'nix than windows (in the same area as volume control, you can redirect a playback stream: NICE), but getting the Microphone input to work consistently can be very frustrating.

b) Load times in Linux seem longer. For whatever reason, the assets also appear to be larger which is probably a contributing factor. Perhaps there's some licensing issues between how assets are compress between the two OS's, leading Linux to be a bit bigger.

That said, once the game is going DOTA2 and L4D2 are just as good in 'nix as windows. In fact, the window-switching is better/smoother so you can alt-tab without killing your game or dealing with annoying stutters.

It's not difficult to port to Linux, it just takes time on old titles that were never designed with Linux in mind.

That said, my Steam account has 126 Linux games from 627 games total. That's not a bad ratio considering that I've never bought a Steam game just because it has a Linux version, and that in any non-Steam count, the ratio of Linux games I own would be much, much, much, much less.

I don't know about Mac - it seems hard to find out how many Mac games I would have on Steam if I was to load it up on

There's a few Windows + Linux only titles, but they typically don't stay that way for long. It usually just means the Mac port is still in development. For example Cannons Lasers Rockets [steampowered.com] is Win+Linux only right now, but it's an "early access" game.

I was curious so I thought I'd see it for my library even though I figured won't be gaming on Linux any time soon. And even though that latter thing is still true, I was surprised; several titles that I thought were not available for Linux have been added, like Mark of the Ninja.

For me, 25 of 84 titles in my library (I have a much smaller collection than you, apparently:-)) are available on Linux. That's actually a higher percentage (30%

I don't know, really.I've played stuff before (point & click adventure games) where you're dropped into a world with no knowledge of anything and expected to get a certain way through before any kind of plot exposition.

and it's not like the game was silent - I had everything except the vocals.

and it's not like the game was silent - I had everything except the vocals.

Did you not turn on subtitles?

That's the thing with modern games I like - they all have subtitling options which I promptly set to "always on"

That said, there are still evil games out there that have dialog and no option to have subtitles at all. Naturally there's always a point where a poorly mixed piece of audio overwhelms the dialog and you miss some key story plot or something.

I'm not the OP, but I hate subtitles. Especially for a game like Portal, so much of the humor is in the delivery of the lines that I feel that seeing the subtitles appear and reading ahead (which is essentially impossible to avoid, at least for me) spoils the experience a lot. I also feel like it takes me out of the experience a bit.

If the games had an option to "show me subtitles but only display the subtitle for a line after the line is complete" I'd probably use it a lot mor

And I sort of stopped after 10-14 dependency issues, and by then...I've not even managed to get STEAM installed. Heh....the Open Source software BLENDER 3D (which in my case, use the Nvidia Drivers on my system), installed...and compiled from source like a DREAM... why can't these Valve people learn from that? I'm a long time Linux user (14 years or so), but I'm not a genius by a long shot, just an average Linux user I guess.

Despite being a Slackware fan, it has to be said the package dependency issues are ALWAYS going to plague Slackware. It just doesn't have automated dependency resolution compared to just about every other distro on the planet.

That's both a wonderful thing (compiling from source is much nicer and only uses the things it needs to rather than everything under the sun) and a nightmare (when you want to just install a closed-source Linux binary that integrates a lot of libraries for every possible gaming-related library under the sun in order to run "Big Picture" mode).

That's not the issue at all. The problem is Valve releases their shit dynamically linked to very particular versions of things like glibc... the versions, specifically, that ship in the latest ubuntu. They could just as easily build it against older, still-secure versions of librares to make it more portable. Or they could do the sane thing and release static binaries, since the bulk of any game download is assents and not executable code.

No matter how much Linus Torvalds hate Nvidia, they are still the only company that I know of that has...the last 7 years... gotten that part right. They've made an install script that basically works on every blend of Linux on the planet, and I really mean that...It really just WORKS. All you have to do is to download it, and sh Nvidia....blah blah. and it does the rest for you, 3d support - right there, no fiddling with a gazillion dependencies, and you don't even need a repository or package installer.

Really? I guess YMMV; I deliberately sought out a laptop with an Intel GPU because Intel's drivers are open source, and as such are already shipped with any OS. Nvidia's installer "script" requires you go google for it and download it manually, it subverts your package manager, breaks every OS update, has frequent problems with xorg.conf, required tinkering with nvidia-xconfig... once I even had to manually remove the script part of the file and untar it manually because of some incompatibility...
It coul

I don't google for it, I go to nvidia's website and quickly find it from there. The script can be invoked with --help, then you can find out how to rebuild the kernel module instead of reinstalling everything (useful for a kernel update or booting an older kernel in grub). You can enable forced anti-aliasing and/or anistropic filtering, just like under Windows. Your distro may or may not provide a version that you can install by clicking a couple things. There's actual documentation in/usr/share/doc.

Despite being a Slackware fan, it has to be said the package dependency issues are ALWAYS going to plague Slackware. It just doesn't have automated dependency resolution compared to just about every other distro on the planet.

That's both a wonderful thing (compiling from source is much nicer and only uses the things it needs to rather than everything under the sun) and a nightmare (when you want to just install a closed-source Linux binary that integrates a lot of libraries for every possible gaming-related library under the sun in order to run "Big Picture" mode).

OR, you take the best of both worlds: dependency resolution with compile-time feature selection and customization/optimization. It's called Gentoo.

This is obviously wrong as there are over 800 titles available for linux, but Valve hasn't published 800 source-engine games.
Even limiting the scope to big-publisher FPS stuff you're still wrong on two fronts.
CS:GO is still missing.
Metro: Last Light (using the 4A engine) has been available since November.

This is the game I was waiting to show up on linux. The vanilla single player and coop campaigns are far from the best aspect of Portal 2 now. The custom maps are where it's at and the ingame custom maps browser, downloader, rating system, and "series subscription" functionality remove all of the pains of hunting for the perfect maps. I highly recommend people check out the custom maps if they're fans of puzzles--there are some extremely challenging ones that will test both your mind and your agility. A

Haven't been able to try it out yet (poor internet), but according to the following link "...users have access to the Workshop and can download any custom map they choose". http://news.softpedia.com/news... [softpedia.com]

Nice! I should have mine setup today (I can't actually download it because the single DL is much larger than my monthly bandwidth allotment, so I need to *drive* to an ssh server I've setup... 'mericuh internet). I'm trying to remember what collections are especially good because I haven't played in a while (should change now that it's available on linux), so assuming my memory is still good: